Guardian Technology - Mapping Britain's blogosphere (but not on this side of the Irish Sea)

I was disappointed at the Guardian's article by Guy Clapperton entitled Mapping Britain's Blogosphere that was published on Thursday morning (20th December). I held off ranting about this on AiB for couple of days, but since there's been no reply from the Guardian, here goes!

Firstly, it seemed poor to publish an article about blogging and then not turn on the commenting feature on the website to allow readers to have a conversation about the article. Not very new media in an industry in which the Guardian is trying to lead the way. And it flies in the face of the concept of blogging.

Secondly, while the article's author deserves a small pat on the head for his inclusion of two cities in Scotland (Edinburgh and Glasgow) and Wales (Cardiff and Swansea), there wasn't even a tokenistic nod towards Northern Ireland which has a growing blogging community (some of whose posts are aggregated at northernirishblogs.com).

In an email to the Guardian's Technology editor - though he hasn't yet deemed it worthy of a reply - I suggested that

"next time someone commissions an article about the UK, why not include all the nations and regions - not just the ones that can read the Guardian in full colour ..."

a reference to the old Portadown press that means that NI readers get greyscale pictures instead of full colour and lose the TV reviews from G2.

Update - 30 December - Charles Arthur (editor of Technology Guardian) did reply tonight with a brief email.

Further update - 3 January - And an edited version of the email was published as a letter in the Technology Guardian pullout this morning (thanks to colleague Paul who noticed and tipped me off) - carefully removing any mention of this blogs URL and the final clause mentioning losing the TV reviews from G2.

Update - January 7 - Oh, and Charles Arthur published a blog entry of all the letters he received over Christmas, including even more related to the Blogging Britain article.